Thank you so much for the links, Lynx. I shall be having a proper read over them.

It was an acronym that was used in a documentary I was watching about something else, otherwise I would never have heard of it. Flying under the radar well. Too well?

Since then it has cropped up a few times and never with a positive light shed on it either. I am thinking it must be a really terrible plan as I have yet to hear anyone actually come out in its defense. And for some reason that alarms me all the more....

Negotiations are done in secret and this is not in the interest of the people, just big corporations.

There is this one stipulation that allows the US to sue if a country changes laws so that it aversely affect export from the US.
And this sueing is not done in a regular court of law but some stupid tribunal thingy.
As far as I know Europe has said no to this stipulation, but the change they suggested isn't much better, still outside regular court of laws.

There are way too many differences between the US and Europe for this to work in anyone's best interest, unless you are already rich.

Wow. This is a monster. Bigger and uglier than I had anticipated. It needs chasing off with sticks. Bloody big sticks. With sharp pointy things affixed. And pronto!

This bit scares particularly alarms me -

'The anti-slavery amendment that Senator Menendez almost accidently slipped in, is now being watered down so that Malaysia won't be excluded from the trade agreements.'

So, given this is bad, unbelievably bad, now I have two questions.

1.What are the practical ways to put a stop to this?

2. Which nutjob is behind all this? Sure there are discussions, negotiations and deliberations going on by world leaders now, but someone, someone, actually gave birth to this as an concept. Surely they must be found before they are allowed to 'breed' again??

Of course, by giving corporations the right to sue countries, we are giving corporations the ultimate power to decide policy and taking policy decisions away from elected governments. I don't see how this won't destroy democracy. Corporations will have all the money and power and there won't be a thing in the world countries, states and communities can do to avoid being run over by them. Your vote will matter only on subjects corporations don't care about.

When dd we change from thinking government was suppose to protect and empower people to thinking its only job was protecting business? How did we get here?

""Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) expresses its dismay that TPP countries have agreed to United States government and multinational drug company demands that will raise the price of medicines for millions by unnecessarily extending monopolies and further delaying price-lowering generic competition. The big losers in the TPP are patients and treatment providers in developing countries. Although the text has improved over the initial demands, the TPP will still go down in history as the worst trade agreement for access to medicines in developing countries, which will be forced to change their laws to incorporate abusive intellectual property protections for pharmaceutical companies."

It looks like CETA may fail completely. It looks like the Canadian team went into it with the approach of the EU speaking for each individual country, not realizing how much say the individual countries of the EU have on this matter.
The EU acted like they had all the say when talking to Canada, even though they didn't/don't.
Canada needs to broaden trade deals so we're not so reliant on the USA, but the way things are negotiated leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Corporations should be given the power to invalidate local laws for their own profit.